An evening of empowerment with Embrace

“Your body is not an ornament, it is the vehicle to your dreams” – Taryn Brumfitt.

There’s a body image crisis embedded in our society right now. It defies gender and age, and can be all-consuming, to the point of diagnosable mental health conditions bound to the way we view our bodies and compare ourselves to others.

It’s this very crisis that compelled body positivity activist Taryn Brumfitt to act and in doing so, set up Embrace: The Union Project – a campaign seeking to find 2,000 people to host a screening of social impact documentary Embrace – which stars Taryn Brumfitt herself. The documentary explores the serious issue of body image in modern society. Once the mission of 2,000 screenings across the UK has been completed, the Body Image Movement will make the Embrace Education Study Guide accessible to all UK secondary schools, for free!

Last Thursday, Holistic Health and Eating Psychology coach Wendy Stringer hosted a lovely evening at PG HQ, for an exclusive screening of Taryn’s thought-provoking and inspiring documentary. It certainly felt empowering to be part of The Union Project and the documentary touched upon many issues facing women, young and old alike, around their self-perception and why self-acceptance in today’s media controlled world of apparently ‘perfect’ bodies can be an ongoing personal battle.

Taryn’s amazing journey started when she was thrust into the media spotlight after sharing a ‘before’ and ‘after’ photo with a difference on her Facebook page. The ‘before’ image showed Taryn in a bikini, honed and toned following the birth of her three children. The after – six months later, a softer, paler (and happier) Taryn, embracing her body for all of its perceived ‘flaws’. The result, in Taryn’s own words “broke people’s brains that someone could love their body afterwards!”

The image went viral, with millions of social shares and Taryn becoming a media icon for self-acceptance and positive body image. The Embrace documentary follows Taryn embarking on a journey across the globe to meet and connect with other women, all in different stages of self-acceptance after struggling with their own body image in one way or another.

Following the screening, Wendy held a Q&A session, where we openly discussed the issues brought up in the Embrace documentary, how they not only affect women but children and men too. We also discussed social media’s increasing role in perpetuating an unobtainable ‘idealistic’ figure. One thing’s for certain, celebrating our bodies and embracing our flaws allows space for others to do the same – and a lot can be learnt from a paradigm shift which looks at the human body (in all its forms) for what it can do and NOT how it looks.